Format: PC
Release date: 2001
Return to Castle Wolfenstein introduced me to the world of PC gaming. I have my uncle Dave to thank for this. He used to play two games, Wolfenstein and Fighter Ace, and I loved going round his house because he had a gaming PC, curiously built by a company called Gateway… The PC was something so alien and awesome to me that it made my N64 seem like the toy it always was (I still love you, my 64). Wolfenstein became Enemy Territory, a free standalone multiplayer component, but it was the ‘original’ Return to Castle Wolfenstein that dragged me into PC gaming, and I’ve never looked back since.
The singleplayer was all about shooting Nazis, but as soon as the game introduced zombies on about the fourth level, I couldn’t play it any more. I had yet to grow a spine. Multiplayer didn’t have any zombies, though. It was a pure WW2 shooter, Axis vs Allies, no frills first-person combat. It was the first game that I ever played which let you choose a role – you could be a medic, a soldier, engineer, lieutenant, and each class supported each other. Teamwork became an essential tactic; a team full of regular soldiers wouldn’t be able to complete all the objectives in a level.
Let’s take the classic Beach level as an example. First you’d need an engineer to blow up a hole in the wall using TNT and pliers. Lieutenants could dish out ammunition and call in artillery strikes on the bunkers overlooking the beach. Medics, useful in any situation, would run around handing out medpacks and jabbing injured soldiers back to life with adrenaline shots. And finally, flamethrower wielding soldiers were deadly in the tight confines of the trenches and pillboxes, cooking enemies alive with a stream of molten fire. Oh, god there are few games that have a more satisfying flamethrower.
This game started my love affair with FPS games on the PC, and while the accuracy and nimbleness of using a mouse and keyboard helped, I think the classes were a massive part of that. It paved the way for games like Planetside and Battlefield, other excellent examples of class-based multiplayer shooters. Team Fortress Classic deserves some recognition here I’m sure, but I only played the long-awaited sequel many years later. For me, Return to Castle Wolfenstein is where my PC gaming passion took hold. I was 13 when I built my first computer, again thanks to my uncle Dave who showed me how to do it, just so I could play Wolfenstein with him. I have gone through 6 or 7 iterations since then, constantly upgrading it every now and then. Owning a PC is a wonderful hobby, and more than that, gave birth to my entire career as a web designer, animator, writer, and geek… and Return to Castle Wolfenstein was my gateway.
Dome Keeper is an excellent little spin on the tower defense game, in which you play the role of a jetpacking miner defending his base from swarms of aliens, whilst searching for a hidden relic buried somewhere beneath him. And now, with this huge free update, you can play it with friends.
I want to talk about Cloudpunk, a game where you get to be a flying-car delivery driver in a futuristic cyberpunk city. Its world is an incredible achievement of environmental design, and while the gameplay itself may be basic, the city of Nivalis is a thing of beauty to behold. Nivalis is built out of hundreds of hand-modelled cuboid buildings; there’s nothing procedural about it. Apparently it took 3 years for the devs to design the city, and it really shows.
I do love me some quality pixel art, and it doesn’t get much better than this. Cast n Chill is a cozy side-scrolling fishing game by small indie dev team Wombat Brawler, with absolutely gorgeous visuals. It’s simple to play, and you you can dip in and out of it at your leisure, making it a fine addition to our collection of coffee break games.
Format: PC
Release date: 2013
Well, fuck. A FPS horror game, set in a mental asylum where all the patients are violent hyper crazed lunatics, and you are a guy armed only with a night vision video camera and can’t fight back? Better get Clarkie to play that shit.
It’s safe to say that Fumito Ueda’s third game was one of my most anticipated titles of the previous generation. Announced in 2009, I eagerly watched every gameplay trailer and read up every snippet of information I could. Ico and Shadow of the Colossus remain two of my most beloved games, and I found the idea of another game by the same studio a mouth-watering temptation. A multitude of delays and long periods of silence from both Sony and the developers led many to believe it would never see the light of day, not to mention the troubling news that Ueda himself had left the project due to creative differences with Sony. The game lingered in development hell for several years and its fate was uncertain. Ueda and his team remained with the project as consultants and the game eventually had a release date set for December 2016. My excitement rekindled and I wondered how it could ever live upto 7 years of anticipation. So, was it worth the wait?
Is bingeing bad for us? It seems an obvious question, but I have been thinking about it lately, while revisiting Lost, the tv show that started 22 years ago (cripes, I feel old). Back when it was airing, my friends and I watched it religiously every week, talked about it in great detail, eagerly awaiting the next episode. It was the definitive show of its time, sparking debates and endless theories. It felt great to be a part of that, the sense of all experiencing the same thing together over a long period of time – most seasons had over 20 episodes, which is way more than most shows get these days – and they aired one by one, every week for several months. In today’s age of bingeing a show from beginning to end, I wonder what we are missing by not taking our time.
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